This is the first day of panel discussions and concerts of “Nancarrow at 100: A Centennial Celebration” a three day festival of films and music celebrating the life and work of Conlon Nancarrow. The festival was produced by Other Minds in collaboration with Cal Performances, the U. C. Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive and was held on November 2-4, 2012.
After a brief introduction by Cal Performance Director Matias Tarnopolsky, Charles Amirkhanian, Artistic and Executive Director of Other Minds, gives a short talk reminiscing about his honeymoon trip to Mexico City to meet Nancarrow for the first time, and his role in reintroducing the music of Nancarrow to the world, beginning in the 1970s and continuing up to the present day. Amirkhanian then welcomes the panelists to the stage for a half hour discussion. Panelists include Felix Meyer, Director of the Sacher Stiftung, a music manuscript library in Basel which is currently preserving the Nancarrow archives, Kyle Gann, composer and author of “The Music of Conlon Nancarrow,” Trimpin, a renowned sound sculptor, Nancarrow’s widow Yoko Sugiura-Nancarrow and their son David “Mako” Nancarrow, as well as Peter Garland, a composer and original publisher of Nancarrow’s “Studies for Player Piano.” Highlights of the discussion include Yoko briefly describing her own work as an archaeologist and how little interest the otherwise widely read Nancarrow had in the elucidation of ancient artifacts. Her son Mako then relates the challenges of having a musical and philosophical genius as one’s father, and Trimpin demonstrates Nancarrow’s “Study No. 25” performed on a computer controlled player piano, albeit without the sustain pedal which gives the ending of the piece such resonance. Kyle Gann adds historically relevant information about the composer and his music. Mr. Meyer describes the work of preserving musical manuscripts of Nancarrow, Stravinsky and other experimental modern composers. The discussion concludes with Peter Garland ruminating on the nature of fame, and how for Nancarrow recognition and financial reward always took a back seat to the integrity of the work.
The concert begins with some brief remarks by Charles Amirkhanian, Artistic and Executive Director of Other Minds. He then introduces Trimpin, a composer and sound sculptor who has realized many of Nancarrow’s works utilizing a variety of technologies including a digital controller for a piano called a Vorsetzer, and other elaborate percussive sound sculptures, one of which he describes in detail. Trimpin also discusses Nancarow’s “Studies for Player Piano,” (which were composed from 1948 to 1992), describing the process by which the composer used precise measurements and a hole punch machine to create his piano rolls and how these were then scanned into a computer by Trimpin enabling them to be performed on a regular piano using a computerized controller of his own creation. The second half of the concert features Rex Lawson on pianola, a specialized type of player piano that allows a live performer to adjust timing and dynamics. Lawson the world’s foremost expert on pianolas performs arrangements of music by Nancarrow, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Percy Grainger. The concert concludes with the U. S. premier of Jean Grémillon’s score for his 1926 film “Un Tour Au Large.” The piano roll for this work was discovered by Lawson while searching an online auction site and was later identified as the score to this now lost silent film. Both Trimpin and Lawson tell the stories behind many of the compositions as well as the various technologies employed during this wonderful concert of player piano and pianola music.
The second concert featured the Calder String Quartet performing works by Conlon Nancarrow and Béla Bartók interspersed with the four movements of Thomas Adès’ string quartet “The Four Quarters.” Composed in 2010 the title of “The Four Quarters,” as with many of Adès’ instrumental compositions is suggestive but not programmatic, with each of the four movements presenting sonic realizations of varying moments of time or cycles and which vary in tempo and expressiveness.
Works by Nancarrow include his “String Quaret No. 1” composed around 1945. This early quartet “features a sequence of movements (fast, slow, fast) and specific thematic and harmonic figures that give it a neoclassical touch but also anticipates certain characteristics of the construction of Nancarrow’s later music for player piano.” These tastes of things to come includes the “use of isorhythmic sequences and ostinati” as well as the inclusion of a number of complicated canons in the later two movements. The second work by Nancarrow performed here is his “String Quartet No. 3” which was composed in 1987 and marks the later phase of his career during which his music had been rediscovered by a legion of friends and fans, and he had begun to experiment with less “textual density” and “irrational tempo relations” which had made much of his previous works difficult if not outright impossible for humans to perform. However while perhaps less technically challenging this work still showcase’s Nancarrow fascination with canonic structures and intricate tempos. Paul Usher’s arrangement of Nancarrow’s “Study No. 33” originally composed for player piano but transcribed for string quartet highlights the difficulty of adapting such radical tempo changes and probably represents the “absolute limits of what can be transcribed” for such a traditional instrumentation. The fact that Usher was successful is both a testimony to his considerable skill but also the richness of the source material.
After an intermission the concert concluded with Béla Bartók’s “String Quartet No. 5” composed in 1934. Along with Igor Stravinsky, Nancarrow has said that Béla Bartók was his greatest influence. While well known for quoting folk music of his native Hungary in many of his works, the “String Quartet No. 5” while clearly influenced by folk idioms, refrains from actualy quotation of such music. Instead it is vital and expressive composition “consisting of five movement, arranged in an arch: the first and last movements, which are fast, share thematic material; the second and fourth are slow and similar in mood; and the third, a scherzo, is the keystone of the entire work.”
Note: Quotes taken from the concert program guide featuring notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda on “The Four Quarters,” Felix Meyer on works by Nancarrow, and Nigel Bolland on Bartók.
Notes
For more detailed program information and to browse other material in the Other Minds Archive visit: radiOM.org